Does Ontario need to build on the Greenbelt to ease the housing crisis? Not so fast, say some experts

In a blistering report this week, auditor general Bonnie Lysyk said removing thousands of acres of Greenbelt land was not necessary to reach a target of 1.5 million new homes by 2031

thestar.com
Aug. 11, 2023

Does Ontario need to open up the Greenbelt to meet soaring demand for housing?

In a bombshell report released Wednesday, provincial auditor general Bonnie Lysyk said no ---suggesting developing parcels of the formerly protected land would come with a litany of problems, chiefly around infrastructure and services. It’s a conclusion echoed by numerous planning and development experts, who say that land availability isn’t blocking home construction.

“There are many reasons why we are not meeting our housing targets,” Matti Siemiatycki, director of University of Toronto’s Infrastructure Institute, told the Star on the heels of Lysyk’s report. “But the availability of land is not at the top of that list.”

In her final report as Ontario’s auditor, Lysyk scrutinized the controversial decision by the Ford government to remove thousands of acres from the Greenbelt last year for development. Even as the province aims to get 1.5 million new homes built by 2031, Lysyk contended that it was unnecessary to alter protected environmental land to do so ---and that developing the formerly shielded properties would require expensive and time-consuming investments into water, sewage and electrical systems, as well as public services from new roads to schools.

But it’s a stance the government continues to reject, with housing minister Steve Clark telling reporters Wednesday that opening the Greenbelt was needed to meet the 10-year housing targets. “We can build more homes, or we can sit back and let the crisis get worse,” Premier Doug Ford added ---as at least one industry group has raised concern about dwindling developable land supply.

At the heart of that tension is a fundamental question. When more homes are needed ---in the midst of a housing crisis where squeezed supply has put upward pressure on rents and made it increasingly hard to purchase a home ---where should development go?

Siemiatycki argues that the answer isn’t sprawl into further reaches of the GTA, but targeting home construction to already-serviced pieces of land where new development can move fastest.

“We don’t have a land shortage,” Siemiatycki told the Star. “We have challenges with approvals, we have a development climate that’s becoming increasingly challenging with inflation and with rising interest rates, and then we have skilled worker shortages.”

The same argument was made in a report from the province’s own housing affordability task force last year, which said land shortage was not the cause of Ontario’s housing woes.

To boost housing quickly, Siemiatycki believes infill should be the main focus. He offered the example of underused strip malls, shopping malls or areas around transit stations which could, with fewer servicing and infrastructure updates, handle a significant number of new homes.

“You need water, you need sewage, you need electricity, you need roads to the door as well as roads in the area and telecommunications,” he said, noting new housing developments also require services such as schools, recreation centres, parks and public libraries. Where they don’t exist, or weren’t built to handle density, Siemiatycki said the needed infrastructure upgrades could seriously set back housing timelines.

Lysyk’s report cites one regional estimate for bolstering infrastructure on the Duffins Rouge Agricultural Preserve lands, saying it would cost between $1 billion and $2 billion for a 25-year process that would include expanded water and sewage treatment plants, new roads and transit.

The team making decisions about the Greenbelt changes were in the dark to these kinds of needs, her report suggested, as their confidentiality agreements prevented them from consulting municipalities and reviewing infrastructure plans for each site.

(Ford conceded post-report that the decision-making process should have been better.)

Speaking generally, Joe Nanos, a former city planning director who now works for developer Tridel, said a property is quicker to develop if it is already “serviced to the property line.”

“You can’t really pull a building permit until you have services,” he said. Timelines could be sped up, he said, if that process was condensed ---offering the example of a recent Tridel project where they were allowed to start foundation work simultaneously on a road project.

When Lysyk’s team spoke with the chief planners of Durham, Hamilton and York ---which encompass all 15 sites being removed ---they reported the Greenbelt parcels were “largely not serviced, were not in their servicing plans, and that many of the land sites would be challenging to prioritize and service in the near future.” According to Lysyk, the planners indicated they had sufficiently serviced land to meet housing targets without adjusting the Greenbelt.

Still, data shows many cities are so far falling behind on their housing goals, as first reported by CBC News. For example, in Clarington, the province hopes to see 13,000 homes constructed by 2031, but just 729 started construction from Jan. 2022 to June 2023, per Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp. (CMHC) data ---though cities like Pickering appear to be on track.

While Siemiatycki stresses that land availability isn’t a key factor in lagging development, David Wilkes, president of the Building Industry and Land Development Association (BILD), argues that developable land across the GTA and Hamilton area has been shrinking in recent years.

(It was at a BILD dinner in 2022, Lysyk found, that two developers gave Clark’s chief of staff information about sites they wanted removed from the Greenbelt. Asked about this, Wilkes said beyond formal consultations, they were not involved in talks about adjusting the Greenbelt.)

That reduction, in combination with infrastructure projects sometimes taking 15 or 20 years to complete, is affecting the province’s ability to get homes built, Wilkes wrote. And he sees the province’s 1.5 million-home target as “conservative” given increases in immigration targets. “This amplifies the need to designate land that can be quickly serviced for growth,” he added.

Still, Toronto’s former chief planner ---and one-time mayoral candidate ---Jennifer Keesmaat believes available land isn’t the problem.

“It’s really a straw man argument that was generated as a PR tactic, in order to create a veneer of acceptability to be taking lands out of the Greenbelt,” Keesmaat said, adding that housing growth was being stunted by factors such as the “high cost of construction, access to labour, access to financing, lengthy convoluted planning processes, and antiquated zoning bylaws.”

Given the concern raised by municipalities about the timelines of servicing the former Greenbelt lands, Keesmaat argued there was “no way” the land could be used to deliver turnkey homes by 2031. She urged officials to instead look at options like car parks near GO stations ---land that is already connected to sewers and electricity and nearby amenities like parks and schools.

“Anyone who lives anywhere in the GTA can point to surface parking lots where we could easily be building housing,” she said.